flora – Page 15

A walk in the woods

We had an unexpected guest yesterday, so I ended up not getting a chance to post about the walk in the park. I’d actually just got back from a return trip yesterday, where Raven and I walked another part of it, to find we had a visitor. The last couple of days have been so nice, warm enough for short sleeves but not so warm you’re dying. It just seemed a shame not to take advantage of that. Today was cool and rainy, so I’m glad I went out again when I did.

Round trip, we probably walked just over two kilometers (1.2 miles). On a straight and level road that wouldn’t be all that far, but the terrain in the park is far from straight and level. Little mini valleys cut through the granite to create ridges and plateaus. The plateaus are no problem to hike, but the ridges and valleys give you a bit of a workout. Raven outdid both Blackburnian and I; she was still charging onwards even at the end of the hike. She absolutely loved the outing. We let her off-leash in her harness, but she never strayed far from us, no further than her extendable leash would have let her go anyway. And this way, no wraps around trees!

We had no map, no compass, no GPS, and no particular destination in mind. We hiked out towards a promising-looking ridge, and upon cresting that, set our sights on the next. We headed approximately east, but followed the landforms and the suggestion of interesting sights beyond the next valley. There are no trails in this section of the park; in fact, given the size of the park, it’s relatively trail-poor. There’s only one trail that’s somewhat easy for us to reach from our lake, and it’s through a campground at the far north end, some 3 km (1.9 miles) away by boat. Not long after moving in, we had stopped by the park office to pick up some maps and get information on the area. We spoke to one of the staff, who indicated that walk-in access to the park is free, and you’re welcome to just dock your boat on the shore and hike in. So we felt no reservations about doing so.

So we boated directly across the lake, and docked the boat on a narrow gravel beach where the land sloped gently upwards into the park. It’s been a long time since I explored an area without being confined to a trail, or knowing what’s coming next. Everything was new, interesting, and different. There are an interesting array of habitats within the park. From the shore it looks like fairly uniform mixed forest. In fact, when you start hiking in, it turns out to be primarily deciduous, at least the sections we walked through. There were a number of more open areas that resembled oak savannah, though I don’t know if they had quite the combination of characteristics to qualify as such.

There were also a few low, wet areas that were obviously flooded at certain times of year, but not currently. Fallen logs, soft and decaying, were covered with moss and ferns. The area had a very lush, green appearance because of the ferny understory. For some reason, most of the areas we walked through had a sparse understory. It wasn’t that the understory was absent, just that it was thin. There were small saplings and a few little shrubs, patchy wildflowers and vines, but generally it was pretty easy walking. I know deer inhabit the park, so it may be that they keep the understory thinned out. Or, it may be something to do with the soil, or some other factor.

Our “final destination” (meaning, the point where we decided it was getting on, and we were getting tired, and we should start heading back) turned out to be a large, old swampy wetland. It looked like it may once have been a river, but had been dammed by a beaver and flooded, killing the resident trees. This would have happened quite a while ago, as most of the trees were long dead and fallen. Also, the water level wasn’t maintained, and while it appeared the water was probably high enough to form a continuous lake in the spring, by this time in the fall it had dropped substantially, such that the ground was mostly moist with just small patches of water remaining.

Raven, eager to continue on, bounced down and into the wet area to check it out. She paused when it was apparent we weren’t following. She was very good about not getting carried away, and coming back to us when called, with the exception of one spot where her nose found something deliciously intriguing buried in the soil, and she required some coaxing to be drawn away from it (even then, it didn’t come down to us going and picking her up, which I was worried about having to do during the hike – either to take her away from something, or to carry her back when she got tired).

You comin’, slowpokes?

During the hike we came across lots of things that grabbed my interest. I didn’t spend a lot of time paused to examine anything, but did snap photos of the stuff that really caught my eye. One was this frog. I’ve encountered a number of different species of frog here, the most numerous at our house being Leopard Frogs. In the forest, during the hike, the most common were Wood Frogs, I must have seen at least half a dozen of them. But as we came down to the edge of the water, in the muddy wet bits, Blackburnian spotted this guy. I spent a lot of time debating its identification. The tight, squareish nature of the spots on its back and sides made me think Pickerel Frog (a species I admittedly have never seen), while the fact that there were three rows of spots on the back wasn’t a feature of this species. Apparently the definitive feature is bright yellow to the underside of the legs of a Pickerel Frog, but I didn’t think to pick it up. I’m thinking now it might just be a very dark, strongly-marked Leopard, but it may remain a mystery.

I loved these ferns, which were abundant thoughout the park. The circlet of leaflets recalled to me a crown, and I thought perhaps it would be named something reflecting that, but the species is Northern Maidenhair, Adiantum pedatum. I don’t recall seeing them at my parents’, or in that region of Ontario, but it’s very widespread, occurring from coast to coast, and from as far north as Alaska and Labrador down to southern California and Georgia.

Most of what I was paying attention to, though, was fungus, which will be the subject of the next post. As we turned for home, the sun’s rays started slanting low and golden, illuminating the trees with rich light. A forest that is cool and shady during the day, when the sun is shining straight down on the canopy, becomes aglow as the sun sinks toward the horizon.

Our house, at the end of the day, as viewed from the park; the only reason I knew I was looking toward our house was because of the barely discernible pale line created by the trunk of the big aspen at the shore. There’s so much more to explore, but it will have to wait for another day. Home beckons, with cold drinks and a place to put your feet up.

Teeth on the outside

We’ve now had Raven for two weeks. It sure doesn’t seem that long, although she’s settled in and feeling more adjusted to things. She’s finally housebroken, and will even whine at the door when she needs out (rather than us having to keep to a schedule). She’s learning commands; so far she knows sit, down, stay and shake a paw (I’m sure the latter will prove invaluable). And, I’ve been taking her on walks down the road.

There were many reasons I wanted to get a dog, but on the purely selfish side of things one of them was to force me to get out and get more exercise, which I am horribly lax about if I don’t have something to make me. I’ll have good intentions for a while, but invariably they’ll lapse. So having a dog would make me get out, I wouldn’t have a choice, because it would be for the dog, not me. I do way too much sitting around anyway, it’s just that sitting around is so easy. So far I’ve been enjoying the walks, though we’ll see how I feel come January…

It was while out on one of these walks last week that I happened to spot some intriguing fungi on a tree along the side of the road. It looked like bracket fungi, stacked up horizontally in the crevice of the tree trunk. It occurred to me that I’d seen a small patch of this stuff on a tree further down the road, in the other direction, but hadn’t paid it much attention other than noting its presence. I returned this afternoon to get some photos of it, too. It was higher up than I remembered.

It took me nearly a week to finally remember to grab my camera with all the other gear I was picking up as I took Raven out, and when I returned to the tree today to take its picture, all the fungi were gone, scraped off and dumped in a pile at the foot of the tree. I was a little surprised, but then, it was adorning a tree that was at the foot of someone’s driveway, so perhaps they found the stacked-pancake appearance unsightly. I also thought, perhaps they view fungi as the cause, not as the symptom, and scraped it off thinking they’d save the tree. Heheh, I thought, the fungus is there ’cause the tree’s already dead inside so scraping it off won’t help, but nice that they cared enough about their tree to worry about it.

Well. The last laugh was on me, of course. I had spotted another tree sporting the same fungus deeper in the woods between that one and home, so I took Raven back and put her in her crate before returning and hiking the short distance into the forest to get photos. I examined the fungus closely, making sure I paid attention to the underside, taking several photos for the blog, then went back to identify it.

I’d recently gone on a bit of a spending spree and ordered myself a dozen or so books online. Some of these were reference books for work I’m doing, but a few were guidebooks. One was the Lone Pine Field Guide to Mushrooms of Northeast North America. Mom had taken this book out of the library way back in the winter to help us identify some of the winter fungi that were in the woods on their property, and I’d really liked it. It took me a while to get around to buying my own copy, but I’m glad to have it on my shelf. It’s to this book I now turned.

Placing it into a group was easy. The first inclination would be to classify it as a bracket fungi, since it was growing on the side of the trunk in horizontal shelves, in the manner of a bracket fungi. However, the underside was covered in fine hairs or spines, giving it an almost furry, fuzzy texture. This placed it in the Tooth Fungi group, the teeth of which offer an increased surface area from which to produce and distribute spores. There were only a few pages of tooth fungi to browse through, and sure enough, there at the end was mine: Climacodon septentrionale, commonly known as Shelving Tooth, or Northern Tooth fungus, a widespread and common species. Although two of the three sets of fruiting bodies I’d found were at or below eye level, it’s apparently more frequently seen higher up on the trunk.

And the last laugh? Well, it turns out that Shelving Tooth grows on the trunks of living hardwood trees, particularly maples, where it invades wounds and causes heartwood rot. Sometimes the rot can be severe enough to weaken the tree to the point that the trunk will snap in strong winds. I’m not sure if scraping off the fruiting bodies will be enough to stave off heartwood rot in that big maple, but it sure doesn’t hurt to try.

Today at Kingsford

I’ve decided to start a regular series on the blog called “Today at Kingsford” (the name of our little lake). It’s been something I’ve toyed with from time to time in the past, and I’d been giving more serious thought to since moving here. Our current location provides me with more material than I can possibly post about, particularly the sort of long, researched posts that tend to accompany most of my photos (a “problem” I didn’t have when I was living in the city). Beyond that, there are many neat things here that it would be difficult to make a full-length post about, but I would still like to share. This will be that forum.

Today’s photo is a good example of that. It started raining yesterday evening, and through the night. When I got up this morning, early, with the intention of going out to do some birding (thinking perhaps the scattered showers through the night may have downed some migrants, or otherwise kept yesterday’s from leaving), it was pouring. Wet, wet, wet. I wasn’t going anywhere. So instead I rolled over for another hour of sleep.

When I did finally get out of bed, and looked out the bedroom window at the trees and forest, the rich colours of the lichen on this tree trunk jumped out at me. I find lichen that can really blend in with a tree on an ordinary day looks beautifully vibrant after a rain, with the darkened rain-soaked bark providing strong contrast to the brilliant pale greens and blues.

Now, I wasn’t about to make a whole post on lichen in the rain, and a photo such as that would just languish on my hard drive, perhaps popping up once in a while on my screen saver slideshow. My hope is that these short posts will be “filler”, for the days in between the longer posts. There will still be days I don’t post anything at all, but while I don’t have the time to do a full-length post every day, I should have time most days to at least put up a photo and paragraph of explanation.

The purple monster

It’s late August, and one of the most maligned flowers to be introduced to North America is blooming in wetlands and damp areas across the continent. The plant is Purple Loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria, and coinciding with the start of its blooming period I’ve been seeing posts on the colourful purple flowers popping up on many of the blogs I read. The general sentiment toward the plant is acknowledgment of its pretty purple blooms but antagonism towards its presence.

There have been big promotional campaigns toward its eradication. I remember as a kid my sisters and I joined my father pulling up some plants that had seeded themselves at the edges of our little swamp and the pond across the road (actually, what stands out most clearly about that afternoon was walking down my neighbour’s driveway to say hello to the woman, who was also pulling loosestrife, while swinging a just-pulled loosestrife plant, with a big clod of dirt at its base, by my side like a walking stick, and her alarmed reaction admonishing me as it would spread seeds). The website PurpleLoosestrife.org has the subheading, “A Beautiful Killer”. Talk about melodramatic! But it is the promoted notion of the plant.

But why loosestrife, over all the other widespread and incredibly invasive plants? The wildflowers in our roadsides and meadows are probably more than half introduced species (if my own observations are any indication), and yet no one’s crying for any of their metaphorical heads. Why has there been no campaigns to control Butter-and-eggs, or Viper’s Bugloss, for instance? There’s no shortage of invasive species; Invasive.org lists 694 exotic plant and 228 non-native insect species on their website as well as 43 other organisms. What makes loosestrife such a target? One reason might simply be its visibility, the bright purple flowers that really stand out in a wetland.

Interestingly, I’ve read a number of articles that have accused the anglers and hunters organizations as being the primary proponents of loosestrife eradication. Do a Google search for “purple loosestrife control” and the #2 site to come up is the page for OFAH (Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters) and #3 is PurpleLoosestrife.org, which, when you look closely, is hosted by Ducks Unlimited Canada. The latter is the #5 site returned by the search, and many of the others on the first page are government or conservation authority sites (I’ll refrain from painting all of these with the same brush, but will state that within the couple of authorities that I’ve had insider insight into, the majority of employees are themselves either hunters or anglers). Why would these organizations take such an interest in Purple Loosestrife? (Conversely, compare a search for Eurasian Watermilfoil, another terribly invasive aquatic species, and only one of the top ten – OFAH – is a hunting/fishing organization.) Only they know for sure, but the argument I’ve seen presented is that loosestrife creates denser habitat that’s harder for anglers and hunters to navigate through, and reduces their productivity on outings. (To be fair, that could all be a bunch of bunk presented by someone with anti-hunting sentiments; that’s the downside of the internet, it’s harder to tell fact from fiction.)

Of course, that’s not the story that’s given for controlling the spread of the species. Whether it was through anglers associations, governments, or other media lines, the general picture presented to the public is one of a ruthless invader, moving into and decimating wetlands (as illustrated by the PurpleLoosestrife.org subheader). We are told that if left unchecked it will completely take over wetlands at the expense of native species, forming near monocultures of a plant that’s non-native and therefore practically unusable by our native fauna. We’re lead to believe that if we don’t do something right away, that sprig of purple flowers you see at the edge of the cattail patch will, within a few years, have wiped the whole stand off the map.

Okay, maybe it’s my turn to lean towards the melodramatic, but it’s not that far from the truth. A lot of research has gone in to loosestrife control, and no fewer than four non-native loosestrife predators (two beetles and two weevils) have been approved for introduction across North America as a biocontrol method. OFAH states that these insects have been established at over 300 release sites across Ontario alone. They also state that these insects have no other known food items, and so their population will be limited by the availability of loosestrife, with the plant and insect eventually establishing a relatively stable relationship at low numbers. (This may be true. Of course, there’s also this saying – most famously stated by Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park – that nature will find a way.)

Of course, it all begs the question: Is all this hoopla really warranted? Is it really as bad as they say? In university, a chapter of one of my courses, Conservation Biology, examined the danger of accepting unproven hypotheses – that is, making assumptions without doing the background research. The example the professor presented for this section of the class? Purple Loosestrife. I don’t remember a lot of what I learned in university, but those lectures really stuck with me. Over the years and through several moves, however, my course notes got misplaced, so when I decided I wanted to do a post on Purple Loosestrife, I emailed my course prof and asked for some of the material pertaining to that segment of his course. He generously obliged with six papers he happened to have on hand on his computer.

The papers are all dated within the last 10 years. They examine a number of common (and prior to that, unproven) assumptions regarding the plants, and actually carry out manipulative experiments (meaning that they manipulate the different variables involved in order to pinpoint the truth of the situation) or quantification studies (where they take samples from plots representing a range of loosestrife conditions, from absent to monoculture) to prove or disprove these assumptions.

The results show a number of things. The first and perhaps most important is that loosestrife, like so many introduced species, requires disturbed habitat to become established. Loosestrife seedlings would only take root and prosper in plots that were experimentally cleared of reed canary grass to simulate herbivore foraging disturbance; 53% of seeds sowed in such plots became established, while 0% became established in non-disturbed plots. A second study showed that in undisturbed habitats, loosestrife was unable to invade and establish itself, as seedlings can’t compete with established, mature native vegetation. However, once a disturbance creates a situation where the native vegetation is removed, allowing the seedlings a window of opportunity to get established, the mature loosestrife plants are able to prevent the young native plants from growing in again. This is where the problem really lies.

This information says to me that the wetlands where loosestrife is found are perhaps not the healthiest to begin with, if they are experiencing so much disturbance as to allow the invader to spread and turn into a monoculture. It could be a natural disturbance – say, severe harvesting of cattail roots by muskrats – but I rather suspect non-natural disturbances such as boats are also at least partially to blame. Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but in our shallow lake the corridors where the motorboats rip back and forth from one end of the lake to the other lack much vegetation on the lake bottom, while areas that don’t get much motorized traffic grow thick and weedy. But these are just my hypotheses, unproven by any sort of scientific research, of course!

As for the claim that loosestrife reduces local biodiversity, it simply isn’t true. One study showed that plant diversity in invaded habitats was actually higher than it was in stands without the loosestrife (and no, it’s not simply because the loosestrife is the additional species). They found that species richness also increased with increasing abundance of loosestrife. They pointed out that this raised the question as to whether loosestrife naturally preferred to invade more diverse stands, or if some factor of the loosestrife’s presence created that diversity; they don’t have an answer, but do point out that previous studies didn’t seem to show a preference for invading stands of either higher or lower diversity.

A second study of the same thing, but in a different location, showed no significant difference between plots with and without loosestrife, and no relationship between species diversity and loosestrife abundance. They did, however, observe that several species were significantly more likely to be found in plots containing purple loosestrife, but no species were significantly more likely to occur in plots without it (again, whether this is due to characteristics of the stand that make it appeal more to both loosestrife and the other species, or if it’s a direct result of the loosestrife’s presence, is the subject for future studies).

Another study looked at aquatic invertebrate diversity between plots with and without loosestrife, and found no significant differences, although they did note that the invertebrates in loosestrife stands tended to be a tad smaller than those found in plots without loosestrife. Whether this is due to dietary deficiencies, some characteristic of the habitat allowing larger bugs to get picked off leaving just small ones, or a local selective pressure toward overall smaller bug sizes, is for a future research project.

I’m pretty sure that, aside from our afternoon plucking plants that one year when I was young, the wetlands by my parents’ have had no control measures, no removal crews, no beetle releases. They also have no muskrats, no people, and no boats. And, they have very little Purple Loosestrife. Even fifteen years later there are still just the odd few plants here and there, mostly along the edge of the road; far from the monotypic stands broadly predicted among all the doom and gloom surrounding the species. Here at our new home, we have a couple plants that are blooming, standing singly at distances from each other, adding a bright splash of colour but hardly threatening the ecosystem.

I think the truth is somewhere in between. I suspect that there are instances, highly disturbed areas that suffer heavy herbivore and/or human activity, that will require human intervention to keep the opportunistic loosestrife from moving in to the compromised wetland. However, I don’t think, based on the research to date, the classifications the plant has received (“noxious weed”, “beautiful killer”, etc) are necessarily warranted. If we humans hadn’t muddled around with the wetlands in the first place, I strongly doubt that loosestrife would be as widespread and abundant as it is today; the low abundance of the plant in relatively untouched areas is evidence of this. Something to ponder next time you see these purple flowers growing at your local patch.

Flowers in my lawn

We have a small lawn on one side of the house, an open area across half of the narrow plateau between the road and a steep hill or ridge that leads down to the water’s edge (the house is built on the other half). It’s deceptively large, perhaps covering 275 square meters (perhaps 3000 square feet) based on my pacing of it, but looking like it covers only about half that. I actually went out and re-paced it after doing the calculation and finding the result to be 3000 square feet, since my initial estimate when I first looked at it was 1200-1500. But, numbers don’t lie. Supposedly.

The landlord had mowed the lawn prior to showing the house back in mid-July, so the grass was short and tidy. However, when we moved in, we found that he’d taken the lawnmower with all his other possessions when he moved out. This hasn’t bothered us a whole lot; mowing the lawn has never been one of my favourite activities, and I’d rather leave most of it to grow up and provide nicer habitat for insects and other things than a short-trimmed lawn would. We’ll need to keep the trail down to the dock clear, but the rest can be left alone.

Since it’s been about a month and a half since the lawn was last cut, many plants that some would call “weeds” but I’d classify as “wildflowers” have sprung up and started blooming. I did a quick tour of the lawn cum wildflower meadow this afternoon. I tallied up 15 species that were in bloom in this small area – pretty amazing and a solid diversity of species for a little patch of lawn. These are what I found. My identification of some of these may be off, as I had to look a lot of them up in my field guide to get the specific species – feel free to correct me if I have it wrong!

Butter-and-eggs, Linaria vulgaris. Although it may not be the most common plant or wildflower in the lawn, it’s the one that had the most blooms. It’s an introduced species, of course, just like so many of our familiar wildflowers, and tends to favour disturbed habitats such as roadsides or managed fields – the lawn would fall into the latter category.

Also abundant is Red Clover, Trifolium pratense, shown here with Cow Vetch, Vicia cracca. Both of these are also Eurasian introductions that have established themselves well in eastern North America. In the case of Red Clover, it’s been extensively planted as a hay and pasture crop because it stores nitrogen in its roots which helps to improve soil fertility when used in rotation with other crops, and has escaped into suitable meadow habitats.

Low Hop Clover, Trifolium campestre, is abundant, though not many of the plants were actively blooming. Another flower that’s been introduced from Europe, it’s frequently found in lawns and gardens and other disturbed habitats.

There’s quite a bit of this stuff about, though like the Hop Clover much of it wasn’t in bloom (it looked like it was just finishing blooming). It had me a bit puzzled at first, and I was looking initially at the mints because the leaves had a noticeable scent when rubbed. After a bit of reading I finally decided it must be Wild Basil, Clinopodium vulgare, which is a member of the mint family, Lamiaceae, but not a mint specifically. Members of this family have the interesting characteristic of square stems. Unlike the previous species, this one is actually native to our area, but in the south has likely been introduced from Europe (why from Europe and not northern North America, I don’t know). Like the commercial basil, the leaves can be dried and used as seasoning, though they provide milder flavour than the commercial variety.

I believe this one is Daisy Fleabane, Erigeron annuus. The fleabanes remind me of daisies or asters but with small flower heads with feathery-looking rays (the white petals). The group takes their name from the belief that drying the flower heads and placing them in the home could eliminate flea infestations.

This is a St. John’s Wort, I think Common St. John’s Wort, Hypericum perforatum. It’s another introduction from Europe that has spread across much of North America. It’s considered a noxious weed in many areas because if ingested it may cause photodermatitis, an increased sensitivity to sunlight much like the Giant Hogweed, not only in people who use it for other medicinal purposes but also in animals who graze on it. You’ll see “wort” in the names of many flowers, and it’s an old english word meaning, unsurprisingly, flower. The St. John’s Worts were so named because it was believed they bloomed on Saint John’s Eve, June 24.

I went back and forth on the ID of this one, before finally settling on Wavy-leaved Aster, Aster undulatus. It’s definitely an aster, but I find all the asters tricky to tell apart from one another. Like goldenrod, I think of asters as a fall flower, punctuating the end of the summer, set against the fiery colours of the changing leaves. If I ever have a wedding I’d like it to be in September, outdoors, set among a field of goldenrod and purple asters with red and yellow maple trees as a backdrop.

Speaking of goldenrod… There are many different species of goldenrod, even though we typically just lump them into a single category and label it goldenrod when we’re thinking of the plant. Really, though, there are some goldenrod that have lots of flower stems coming straight out from the main stalk, ones that have nicely arching flower stems with the flowers set along the top, others that have flowers so bunched together they look a little like loose yellow sumac clusters. Still, they can be tricky to separate. I think the arching flower stems on these ones make it Sweet Goldenrod, Solidago odora, but then again, my guide only lists Nova Scotia for its Canadian range, so who knows. I should point out that because goldenrods bloom at the same time as ragweed they’re often blamed for allergies, but actually goldenrod pollen is too heavy to cause allergy problems, since it doesn’t get carried on the wind.

There are a couple patches of this fuzzy-stemmed blue flower, Viper’s Bugloss, Echium vulgare. For those keeping track, this is the third wildflower I’ve mentioned that has vulgare or vulgaris as its species name. Although we tend to think of the word vulgar as meaning ugly, back when these plants were named it actually meant common, and Viper’s Bugloss is certainly that. The name Viper’s Bugloss (the latter word meaning “ox tongue”, which the plant’s leaves were thought to resemble) actually applies to the group, not just this one species, but it’s come to be associated with this species, at least around here. It also goes by the name Blueweed, but I’ve never heard it called that. It’s yet another European introduction, and shares the same habitat preferences as the first vulgaris I mentioned, Butter-and-eggs.

Yellow Wood Sorrel, Oxalis stricta. My guide states, “This plant is a cosmopolitan weed, perhaps originally native to North America.” In other words, it’s now so widespread that they don’t know where it started out from. It’s true it’s very common, you can find it just about anywhere, from roadsides, meadows, and your own garden, growing prolifically between your other plants.

This is a familiar flower to many, Black-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia hirta. It’s the state flower of Maryland, and I tend to associate it with being the flower that makes up the blanket of flowers placed over the winner’s neck of the Preakness Stakes (which is run at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore). Like the Kentucky Derby has come to be known as “the run for the roses” for the blanket of roses placed across the winning horse, the Preakness is sometimes called “the run for the Black-eyed Susans” – somehow just not quite as catchy.

I cheated a bit on this one, these weren’t actually on our lawn, but directly across the road. Queen Anne’s Lace, Daucus carota. It’s funny, I think of this as a widespread flower typical of our roadsides and meadows, but it’s another introduction native to Europe. It’s the ancestor of the cultivated carrot that we eat for dinner, and in fact the Queen Anne’s Lace’s long central taproot can be eaten in much the same way.

I’ve always loved the look of these. This is Bladder Campion, Silene vulgaris (another vulgaris!), so named for the distinctive bladder-like hollow balloons at the base of each flower. Another European native, the campions can be found abundantly along roadsides and in meadows throughout most of North America.

I couldn’t find this flower in my primary field guide, strangely, but believe it to be Carpet Bugleweed, Ajuga reptans. It often grows in dense mats that exclude even grass, my parents’ lawn has several patches of it. Many wildflowers have historical medical uses, long since forgotten and/or replaced by synthesized drugs; in the case of this one it was used to stem bleeding.

Finally, one last flower that I have no ID for. I’ve gone through both my field guides, and can’t see anything that seems to match quite right. It looks a little like a cinquefoil, but doesn’t have the notches in the petals that cinquefoil has. It also looks a bit like a buttercup, but none of the ones in my guide have gaps between the separate petals like this shows. So I dunno. I’m open to suggestions.

It’s quite a nice selection of flowers for a little patch of supposed lawn. I wonder what else is in there that just isn’t blooming right now.